Rick Perlstein laments the political press' failure to put forward a story by which citizens can understand what is actually going on with the 2016 race—not just concerning who might be our next president, but what it all means for the republic. And not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers, too.

Despite calls for participants to refrain from using racial slurs at a rally on behalf of the Confederate flag at the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia (aka the Confederate Mount Rushmore), things apparently did not all go according to plan. While most of the roughly 800 participants professed to be focused on heritage not race, some got into heated arguments with a mixed race crowd of protestors there to voice their opposition to the flag and the monument.

So it turns out Times editor Dean Baquet refused to publish the Clinton campaign's pushback email about the egregiously botched "criminal referral" story the paper published. I'm not going to get on the outrage bandwagon over that. This is high stakes Kabuki on both sides. The Clinton campaign may actually be happy they refused to publish - a better story than having their letter published in the paper.

But ... there's still something highly instructive we can draw from this. It is a really good object lesson on how much more wildly the Times gets played by Republicans than it ever does by Democrats. Fox and the RNC wouldn't be playing them like a fiddle at this point.

Yesterday we posted this fascinating story about the discovery of four graves of some of the top leaders of the Jamestown settlement - the first major and permanent English settlement in North America and the origin point of the Virginia colony and later State of Virginia. But as many have already noted, the issue of real historical, as opposed to antiquarian, significance is the discovery of a small Catholic reliquary in the grave of Captain Gabriel Archer, one of the leaders of the early settlement and a rival of the far better known Captain John Smith, who is often credited with saving the colony in its bleak first years and - less known - was later a key explorer of what became New England.